The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27 C, November 9, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, November 9, 2025

• Job 19:23-27a
• 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
• Luke 20:27-38

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.

-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross 

          Job was such a man.  He lost his possessions.  He lost his children. He lost his pride. And he was about to lose his life.  Everything was taken away from him…and his wife who remained was encouraging him to just curse God and die.  Yet there was something inside Job that wouldn’t let him succumb to despair: “Yahweh gave and Yahweh has taken away.  Blessed be the name of Yahweh.”  Instead of throwing in the towel, he chooses to fight.  But the fight wasn’t just against his so called “friends” who tried to convince him that his suffering was his fault, it was really against God from whom he demanded an answer for his unjust suffering.  And it was precisely through this contending with God that this thing inside Job matured and was perfected.  What was this “thing?”  We call it faith.

          But what is faith?  Job, I believe, gives us a striking expression of what faith looks like.  For him, faith is the conviction that though he can’t rationally understand something, like the reason for his suffering, and even when others are giving him pat answers and bad, uncaring, unsolicited advice, he knows on the most profound level where the truth lies.  He knows and he risks his life on this knowing, this conviction, this faith.  So, even at death’s door after a lifetime of unjust suffering he can say, “…I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”  Even when he doesn’t understand why God has allowed life to deal him such a despicable hand, he chooses not to feel sorry for himself or to focus on his impending demise; instead, he lifts his head high obstinately in the face of this onslaught of inexplicable pain and sees what no one around him sees: the living Redeemer, Vindicator, Defender who he believes will, in the end, right every wrong and bring him to peace.

          Job, of course, is a Christ-figure.  Jesus, himself, will undergo a similar existential crisis after spending years of unjust persecution and suffering.  Imagine knowing you are the Beloved of God yet being told again and again that you are a devil.  Imagine having your closest friends and even your family misunderstand you and turn their backs on you.  And imagine that after exhausting all your energy—your heart and soul—on doing everything you possibly can to please the One who called you “Beloved” only to have the feeling of total, utter abandonment at the time you needed this One the most.  What then?  What would your response be?  To curse God and die?  To throw in the towel?  Or would that flickering spark of faith, of conviction, of knowing arise in you and say, “Nevertheless, into your hands I commend my spirit.” 

          And we may naively think that following a crucified Messiah means that we will be saved from a similar fate—that because he suffered unjustly we won’t.  But we would be sorely mistaken.  “I have not come to bring peace but a sword,” so one saying of Jesus goes.  Of course, Jesus is also the Prince of Peace and has, in fact, come to bring peace…but a peace that will last.  And this kind of peace does not come, he teaches, before the sword pierces straight through our hearts revealing what is in our depths and testing that seed of faith, that inner conviction, that deep knowing. 

          So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see that the early Christians, immediately after experiencing the joy of knowing that their Lord was found to be alive after his crucifixion, that they, too, began to undergo the same trials of unjust persecution and suffering as did their Lord.  This, the community at Thessalonica, was enduring…and their response to their existential crisis…and Paul’s advice to them…is very revealing.

          One thing about suffering is that we want it to end as soon as possible.  We’d prefer a deus ex machina to suddenly appear out of the sky and bring all of this unjust suffering, this cruel chaos, to an end…today, rather than have to endure, persevere, and wait.  Patient endurance amidst the testing of faith sometimes feels like God is playing a cruel joke on us.  No wonder so many characters in the Bible preferred to speak of God’s wrath rather than God’s love.  The Thessalonians, in their despondency, envisioned such a deus ex machina.  They held out hope that Jesus would return “soon and very soon” to save them from their suffering and persecution.  But Paul’s advice to them is to not become fixated on deliverance but to remind them that God has indeed called them to obtain the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.  But they must stand firm and hold fast to the faith they were taught.  And what were they taught: that through the bearing of the cross, just as Jesus bore his cross, they will know redemption and resurrection, just as Jesus knew redemption and resurrection.

          Another thing about suffering, besides wanting to be delivered of it as soon as possible, is that it has a tendency to command all of our attention.  It is very difficult to think of anything else when our lives begin to fall apart.  And it’s our tendency to create societies to protect us from just such moments of crises.  So we accumulate wealth, power, control, prestige, and anything and everything that shields us from the possibility of living a life that might have to undergo the fearful, anxious, threatening moment of contending with our demise.  But one wrong turn, one unfortunate choice, one inexplicable moment can send us reeling and expose just how thin is the veneer that we sought to live behind. 

          So, maybe we’ve got it all wrong.  Sometimes we are not called to deliverance, to salvation…we are called to suffering and persecution.  Not because God is cruel but because within it an invitation is extended to us that we wouldn’t hear or notice in any other way.  But, often, we don’t hear it, and we don’t notice it.  Instead, we become so fixed on our life’s situation that we get stuck in the perpetuating chaos from which we want to be delivered and saved.  We fail to see beyond the surface and that spark of faith which rose up in Job and rose up in Jesus remains covered under the cloak of our despair. 

          I’ve been alive for over a half century now, and never in my lifetime have I sensed such global despair as I do now.  The fear of many has reached its peak, and one global crisis has piled up upon another.  And those of us who really care about this gross proliferation of suffering, often at the hands of those who hold power and are desperately afraid of losing it, are all the more angered at the justification of this abuse by those in charge and the utter negligence of so many who would prefer to look the other way.  And it remains up to us, those of us whose moral core remains intact and whose conscience hasn’t been rationalized away, to persevere in the work of building God’s kingdom of justice and peace. 

          But here’s my greatest concern about this current moment.  The sense that I often get from those of us Christians working for peace is not peace but something much more frenetic, anxious, and dark.  I sense anger, pessimism, and not a little bit of hopelessness.  But how can we create a world of peace when we ourselves are not at peace?  Have we succumbed to the tendency to get stuck on the level of circumstance, and has the suffering of the world caused us to lose sight of the One walking on the chaotic waves of our despair?  Are we failing in faith?  This is my greatest concern: that by going out to the periphery we lose touch with the center.  But this need not be the case.  The only way to the realization of the kingdom of God in this world is for the people of God to remain centered on the periphery and to still the chaos of fear through the stability of faith. 

          This is not a denial of the seriousness of our current crises or a dulling of the urgency to make a difference.  It is, rather, a call to remain centered upon the One who enters with us into our existential crises.  Are we confident that he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world?  Do we see the providential hand of God at work in this mess in which we now find ourselves?  Do we feel that spark of faith, of conviction, of knowing arising from within?  Be not afraid!  And be not anxious.  Instead, see what others cannot see and have confidence that God is creating something beautiful through this slow process of painful becoming. 

    “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.”  With God our suffering will not end in death, because with God all things live.

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost B - November 10, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27 B

1 Kings 17:8-16
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

 Click here for an audio of the sermon

          Life is full of contrasts.  The young and the old.  The rich and the poor.  The good and the bad.  The wise and the. . . not so wise.  Contrasts of color.  Contrasts of opinion.  Contrasts of personalities.  Contrasts of beliefs.  Some see these latter contrasts as life-enhancing, others as life-threatening.  Some live lives that make space for “the other,” while some live lives that dismiss, ignore, or exclude “the other.”  The tension that exists between “us and them” has existed from the dawn of time and is one of the persistent themes in both our secular and sacred writings since antiquity.  But there is one thematic contrast in our own Judeo-Christian Scriptures that may stand above all others, which unifies to whole sacred story from cover to cover.  It’s the contrast between power and weakness, between the callous heart of pride and the wide-open heart of humility.

          In the Gospel of Mark, we are in one instance presented with the self-assured scribe decked in his fine regalia basking in his notoriety and position of authority and honor.  In the other instance we are presented with a poor, defenseless widow with zero self-regard.  One is a taker, the other a giver.  One is preoccupied with a façade, the other with compassion.  One professes faith, the other lives it.

          This meta-contrast of power vs. weakness goes to the heart of the human story—and even beyond to the story of creation itself.  If the evolutionary journey of creation is one of “survival of the fittest,” embedded within our DNA is the ego drive to survive at whatever cost, even if it is at the cost of another part of God’s good creation.  Left unchecked, the ego mounts upon whatever chariot is available to conquer and to control and to dominate—all to secure the propagation of itself into the future.  It lives for immortality and can become consumed with fame, fortune, and the fantasies of its own grandiose imaginings.  The unchecked ego, then, becomes isolated, cut-off from the rest of creation exhausting itself by trying to live on its own terms, in its own fabricated reality.  And at the foundation of its bloated pride is no foundation at all.  There is nothing there but a small, insecure, frightened child masked in a sometimes presentable, often times threatening, persona expending its energy on justifying itself, on defending itself, and on asserting itself.  

          The dangers such a person or group of people that nurtures such egocentrism are obvious enough.  We see it in our civil discourse.  We see it in our politics.  If we are not vigilant, we can even see it in our religious communities.  And, alas, we see it in ourselves.  If only we all saw it in ourselves!  But we don’t, probably because it’s just too painful and uncomfortable.  And maybe the greatest danger facing us Americans at this critical time in our history is the validation, even celebration, of ego-inflation and the denigration of humility and weakness.

          It is prophetic, then, that in light of today’s current events the church in her liturgy holds up before us the dignity and honor of a poor widow.  In the world of biblical patriarchy, a woman who has lost her husband was among the most vulnerable of society.  Without a source of income, without civil recourse, without personal autonomy.  This is why the inspired authors demand particular care for widows.  They are to be provided food and shelter and even a husband, if possible.  And those who neglect and mistreat widows come under the strictest judgment.  Particularly in the prophets, the care of widows is the barometer for determining the health of the nation.  

          This all explains Jesus’ righteous indignation at the scribes who are devouring widows’ houses.  Notice the connection Jesus makes between the abuse of widows and the pomp that preoccupies the scribes.  For Jesus, they are intricately linked together in one unhealthy, unholy alliance.  The scribes religiously exploit the poor widow taking all that she had to, in effect, beautify themselves, of course, all “for the sake of the temple.”  And Jesus will not let such religious hypocrisy go by uncontested.  And so he calls them out on it.  

          The temple which the scribes were supposedly so concerned about was the place where Israel’s God dwelled on earth and the place where Israel could go to dwell with her God in prayer and find refuge and renewal.  Yet, time and again, the temple was exploited for personal aggrandizement and its purposes obscured and manipulated…and its God along with it.  Jesus, in full prophetic mode, subverts the scribes’ destructive egos by revealing where true power lies, right there in the selfless choice of a poor widow who had the ability to give all that she had, her two copper coins, to God.  There is the true manifestation of the presence of God. 

There is the true temple.

          Of course, there is more to the story.  And we hear it in today’s passage from Hebrews.  The poor widow’s gift of all that she had prefigures Christ himself who, as a priest, does not offer something outside himself, like the blood of bulls or goats, but sacrifices his own self.  The Scriptures say that he did this “to remove sin.”  Or, you could say, he did this to deal with the unchecked ego and its abuse of power.  This, then, is the good news for us today: that when God, the all-powerful, omnipotent Creator of all that is, chose to bear the divine heart to the world, it was done through one who, like a poor widow, walked the path of vulnerable humility and weakness, defenseless in the face of civil and religious power structures yet completely free from the egocentric entropy that those power structures create.  And by offering himself in total vulnerability on the cross, unleashes a power… you can say a superpower…upon the earth that alone can transfigure the calloused, power-hungry heart into a humble, open, and free heart that can give of itself without counting the cost, just like this poor, holy widow.

          Today’s other widow, the widow of Zeraphath from First Kings, teaches us another important lesson about such faith and about such a God.  So extreme was her crisis that she resigned herself to death, but she learns, through Elijah’s encouragement, that when we give of the little that we have, God’s power is unleashed and the little that we have can be turned into an unlimited source of life.  This is a truth repeated throughout the Bible, from barren womb of Sarah, to this widow of Zarephath, to the blood and water that poured out of the side of the crucified Savior.  And this truth extends beyond the Bible to us as well when our simple, yet sincere, acts of faith break open the treasury of God’s blessings and we come to know that power is made perfect in weakness.

          This has always been the church’s gospel, her good news to proclaim and live.  But, I assert that it is more crucial now perhaps than ever before that we as church understand clearly and live selflessly this gospel mandate.  Many today have deep, legitimate concerns about both the state of our country and the state of our world.  Many feel anxious and wonder if we’re heading all-too close to an irreversible precipice.  Many are confounded by the abuse of power and the legitimization of hatred and violence that has crept into our society, often at the expense of the most vulnerable in our communities.  And many feel that the distortion of reality may make it nearly impossible to find common ground between contrasting ideologies and fear the place to which this may eventually lead.  If you are among those that feel these things, and I certainly do myself, allow me to offer three Christian responses that may be helpful in light of today’s readings:

1.                 Don’t allow the contrast between your worldview and an opposing worldview cause you to demonize or dehumanize the other no matter how demonic or dehumanizing their worldview may be.  An “us vs. them” mentality will only widen the chasm.

2.                 The process toward justice and peace is a long one full of setbacks and disappointments.  So, hold to the faith that God remains God even when the clouds set in.

3.                 Never tire of preaching the gospel of our crucified Savior.  When the demonic head of hate, division, and lies begins to rear its head, and it almost certainly will, counter it with the gospel of love, unity, and truth.  And don’t just preach it, live this gospel of love in the face of hate, unity in the face of division, and truth in the face of lies.  Absorb these demonic forces in the power that God provides, and put them to death by your refusal to retaliate or propagate them. 

Love covers a multitude of sins.  

          Our Christ was consumed with a vision.  He called it the Kingdom of God.  It was a vision of a time when the demonic forces of hatred, division, and lies would be cast out completely and peace would envelop all creation.  We’re not there yet!  So, let us be consumed with this same vision and put our faith into practice and through our love for one another…all another…and our radical fidelity to the truth, let us continue to fight the good fight, not with the weapons of aggression and force but with the power that comes from God, hearts that make peace because they are at peace and hands that bless even when being cursed.

Proper 27 A - November 12, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt OHC

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27 A, November 12, 2023

 

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Today’s parable can be read as a metaphor for the end times. The message to God’s people seems to be: “Be prepared to wait. Don’t assume you have enough oil in your lamps. Take some rest if you must. Be prepared, be provident.”

In some religious traditions, Advent still begins on the sixth Sunday before Christmas, the Sunday after St. Martin's Day (November 11, yesterday). Advent was that long between the fifth and eighth centuries. You can still find traces of that in the readings of the few Sundays before our current four-week Advent.

The season of Advent in the Christian calendar anticipates the "coming of Christ" from three different perspectives: the physical nativity in Bethlehem, the reception of Christ in the heart of the believer, and the eschatological Second Coming.

Our parable today focuses on the third perspective, on the coming of Christ; His coming in glory at the end of times. The world today makes you hanker for the Second Coming, doesn’t it? Reading, listening and watching (as little as possible) about the world today, can indeed be more anxiety-producing than the end of time. Can all this be over yet, Jesus? But more on that later.

This parable stresses the importance of constant personal spiritual preparedness. Are we always willing to say yes to God’s grace and face the consequences? If you are like me, there are days that your preparedness is wavering.

But in my understanding of God as manifested to us in Jesus, God’s grace is like the sun and the rain. They fall on everyone, the good and the challenging, regardless of merit.

The evangelist Matthew was very concerned with encouraging his community of believers to endure and persevere in the faith.

Matthew is clearly writing for a Jewish Christian audience living within the immediate proximity of the homeland itself. Matthew's is the most Jewish of all the gospels.

At the time of Matthew’s writing, this community was going through incredibly challenging times for their faith. The temple at Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans and the population of Jerusalem scattered to the winds.

Many were hoping for Jesus to return very soon and get everyone home safe and sound in the Kingdom of God.

With the parable of the ten virgins, Matthew is saying “not so fast, folks!” And we still need to hear that message today when it would be so nice to have the Second Coming of Christ take us out of wars and climate change disruptions right about now.

Matthew is suggesting that we will need to wait and that we will have to be prepared for a long wait. Our energy for the wait may be flagging at times. Indeed both the wise and the foolish will fall asleep at times. But in the end, the Bridegroom will be coming in a glorious wedding procession to start times of feasting and revelry in togetherness.

So it seems the point of this parable for the people of God is to live joyfully and expectantly for we are invited to the wedding feast. But we are to live prepared in Christian hope, attempting to discern the will of God and to do it as well as we can.

As Presbyterian pastor John M. Buchanan puts it: “Christian hope rest on trust that the God who created the world will continue to love the world with gentle providence, will continue the process of creation until the project is complete, and will continue to redeem and save the world by coming into it with love and grace, in Jesus Christ.”

In the meantime, there are faithful people genuinely frightened about where human history seems to be headed. Living in hope does not mean immunity to the harsh realities of history. We can’t hide from the realities of the world.

On the contrary, living in hope means living confidently and expectantly, trusting that the Lord of history continues to come into life with compassion and redemption and hope.

So, even in the face of awful trends in the world’s current affairs, we are not to lose hope. We are to trust that God is engaged with it all whether we discern it or not.

In Letters to a Young Poet, the poet being a 19 year-old officer cadet in the Austro-hungarian army, Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
“Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity? … What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?”

Are we, humanity, willing to be pregnant with the Savior once more? Can we accept to participate in this stupendous pregnancy?

On the one hand, we ought not to be lulled into thinking that there is no sense of urgency in preparing for the Lord’s coming. It is foolish to put off obtaining the oil of the “deeds of discipleship.”

On the other hand, the prospect of the end should not produce panic and anxiety. Even the wise maidens were able to go to sleep.

So rest assured, God is coming. Or even, wake up and see that He is at hand.

Still, you may wonder this week, do I have enough oil in my lamp to welcome the Beloved, the Bridegroom. How am I doing the will of our Father in heaven?

In case you need a reminder, as Jesus says earlier in the gospel according to Matthew: “love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:38-40)
And you may have to do this for quite a while. After all, we may be the early Church, the church of the first two millenaries of many more to come. Only God knows the time.

And finally, I think Matthew ended his parable with retribution for the foolish because that’s how he felt at the time about those who did not see God’s grace and respond to it readily. But I happen to be a universalist. I believe God’s grace and mercy are endless. Only those who will, to the bitter end, deliberately refuse to accept God’s grace and mercy will not enjoy God’s deepest embrace and love, but it will be self-inflicted pain.

I believe in a God whose invitation to love is always open even after the wedding party has started.

The Bridegroom is coming home. Let us rejoice and prepare for the feast! Amen.

 

Proper 27 C - November 6, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Proper 27 C - November 6, 2022

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

    According to the lectionary, today’s texts are only read in late autumn close to the feasts of All Hallows, All Saints, and All Souls which may help us overcome some of our skepticism and unease with what is mysterious and unseen. What the ancients called spirits, angels or demons were actual entities to them that exercised power over their lives. Most parishes transfer the Feast of All Saints to today, which partially explains why in 40 years I’ve never preached on these texts.

    The Epistle’s basic story of good winning out over evil and of God and Satan set in opposition includes a decisive confrontation littered with enigmatic persons and forces. The promise is that evil will be defeated. The Thessalonians lived in a time, not unlike our own, of heightened expectation that the end of the world, at least as they knew it, would be coming soon. They were worked up into an apocalyptic frenzy which was splintering the community. The writer is trying to calm them down, refocus their attention, clarify some misconceptions about the return of Christ, and the way in which they should wait together for that return. Gratitude and encouragement are the antidotes to their fear-based hysteria. He reminds them and us of our common calling to be sons and daughters of God and of our inheritance in the glory of Christ.

 

    Haggai, one of three post-exilic prophets, arose in Judah after Persia became the dominant power in the Near East (539 BCE), and the Jews were permitted to return to their homeland. Amid utter despair this small remnant hears a gracious word of affirmation. The divine call to rebuild the temple is a call to commitment and relationship to God. Haggai addresses their concern by assuring them that God is with them and will provide what the people need for rebuilding the temple. They, however, became preoccupied with rebuilding their own houses and Haggai reminds them that they are not in this as individuals but are called and sustained as a community. The community exists for the sake of its members. Growth in holiness is a journey in community.

    Both lessons remind us that we live in and through one another. We become ourselves only through a process of mutual becoming. It begins in God’s own creative, self-giving love. Our core identity rests in the divine Love that birthed us all. We are all one, all loved corporately by and in God. We are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being part of the whole, part of the Body that is Christ. This echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love granted to the Jewish people, and never just to one individual. 

    This awareness of reality upends so many of our current obsessions about private worthiness, reward and punishment, gender, race, class distinctions, and possessions. The Gospel message is about learning to live and die together in and with God. The good news is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in it. We are the blessed beneficiaries, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Mature religion is meant to realign what our egos and survival instincts have put asunder, namely the fundamental wholeness at the heart of everything. The source of our disease and violence is separation from parts of ourselves, from each other, and from God. The early Church understood overcoming divisions as part of its mandate, emphasizing connectedness and oneness in Christ. 

    Throughout history we humans have had a strong appreciation for and connection with our ancestors. The notion of oneness is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The feast of All Saints entered the Christian tradition in the 4th century with a focus on relation and remembrance, offering us the idea that the dead are at one with the living.

    With this in mind, we turn to Luke’s passage. The Sadducees, the wealthy elite, denied life after death. In this passage they set an intellectual trap for Jesus hoping to show that his teaching about the resurrection of the dead was absurd. Their imaginary scenario about the woman consecutively marrying seven brothers in levirate marriage (Gen. 38:8) is intended to make fun of Jesus. Wealth, power, and prestige insulated them from the pain implied in this tawdry tale of a woman passed from one brother to another.  The question they pose has to do with ownership and marital rights. Jesus takes them seriously and makes the basic point that things don’t work in heaven the way they do on earth. Eternal life is not simply a continuation of this life. Although death is the end of many things, it is not the end of God. 

    When Jesus says: “God is not a God of the dead.” He isn’t saying that God is indifferent toward the dead or that God has forgotten them. God’s love for us is eternal. In compassionate love the dead are drawn into God’s heart. As they were, so now they are in God, healed and whole. In heaven all are children of the resurrection. All who lived before us and are now not among us are living in God. Because of that connection to God, they are not dead to us. They still speak today. We are today together with them because God is not the God of the dead but of the living. This kind of mutual interdependence I have sensed to be true with the death of those closest to me. Anyone acquainted with the poignancy of love that lives on after our loved one dies, will recognize this as we read the story of our lives through the lens of the resurrection.

    When Jesus speaks of the God of the living, he is naming the God of newness, forgiveness, and liberation. He does not answer our many questions about the resurrection or provide a road map of the new creation, though one of our fond illusions is that he should. Jesus teaches us how to walk through this great mystery and to trust that God is on the other side of it. When we consider ourselves to be part of a continuum of life that does not end with death, but transitions to a life after life, our perspective changes. Jesus points us to a God whose faithfulness is immeasurable and inexhaustible. In that faithfulness we find enough to endure all that life and death will ask of us.

    In our day it’s easy to become disillusioned, fearful, and self-absorbed as the Israelite remnant and the Thessalonian Christians did. It’s easy to lose hope. To think of the past as a better time than the present seems to be a common human tendency. The move into the future is not just a repeat of the past and a faint echo of former glory. In God’s future we are moving toward and co-creating a surge of wonder, grace, beauty, and love. Our God is a God who makes a way when there is no way. As Christians we are shaped by more than our experiences; we are shaped by our hopes, by the future and convictions into which we are living and dying. Hope is best lived within a hopeful community, in the company of the saints, living and departed. In such company we find comfort and courage as we face the future together.

+Amen.  

Proper 27 B - November 7, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Proper 27 B - Sunday, November 7, 2021

1 Kings 17:8-16

Hebrews 9:24-28

Mark 12:38-44

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Today’s Gospel lesson, traditionally titled "The Widow's Mite" or “The Widow’s Offering” is a go-to narrative for Stewardship Season at many churches. Most of us at one point or another have heard a well-meaning pastor preach a sermon on this Gospel lesson that concludes with something like: "If the poor widow can give her sacrificial bit, how much more should we give out of our abundance to further the Lord’s cause? And I have to say that I find that interpretation somewhat troubling. On the one hand, I see some truth in it. On the other hand, it seems an exploitation of such an important story for the sake of an annual budget.

Before the scene with the widow, the Gospel writer gives us an account of Jesus giving his disciples a scathing critique of the religious leaders of his time for their greed, pompous behavior, and blatant exploitation of the poor. Jesus tells his followers to "beware of the scribes". "They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers." What does this really mean? 

The Temple in Jerusalem was not only a religious institution. It was an economic institution as well with hundreds of employees. It performed many financial functions, including operating as a central bank and treasury. The priests and scribes received a cut from every Temple sacrifice and a portion of a tax collected on every first-born child. Other offerings (some of them better understood as taxes) brought in even more wealth for them, so much so that these priests got into the business of lending money. That meant they were also able to foreclose on property if the debt was not paid. And when someone died, the scribes would immediately come in to help "manage" the deceased person's property because, of course, they couldn’t let the widow do that. Widows in first century Palestine lived on the margins of society, with absolutely no social status, and vulnerable in every way that mattered. And, yes, they charged a fee for their services. And as if that weren’t enough, this kind of exploitation always ended in sanctimonious long prayers. 

In the days leading up to the scene in today’s Gospel story, Jesus has called out time and time again the hypocrisy of the religious elite and the economic and political absurdity and exploitation he witnesses around him at every turn. In a very carefully orchestrated act, he processes into Jerusalem on a donkey to mock Roman pomp and circumstance. He drives out of the Temple those who were selling and those who were buying and turns the tables of the money changers. He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they question him about where he gets his authority. He tells a provocative and scathing parable against chief priests, scribes and elders about a vineyard and a murdered son. He exposes the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Herodians on taxes by confounding them. And on a ridiculous question by the Sadducees about whose wife a widow is at the resurrection, who has been given in marriage seven times, Jesus responds that they know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. 

Given all of this, and that Jesus has just blasted the scribes for their fake and pretentious piety and the corrupt religious institution they govern, I find it hard to believe that the only point to this story is that Jesus wants us to applaud a destitute woman for giving her last two coins to the very institution he considers corrupt. But perhaps what Jesus does want is to take the focus of his disciples (and ours) away from the rich, and to really see this widow.

Jesus, whose eyes are always on the small and the insignificant, wants his disciples and us to really see this woman whose widowhood rendered her worthless and expendable, and yet, had the courage to make her “insignificant” gift with such dignity alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see this astonishingly generous woman who trusted that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes. Jesus wants his disciples and us to really see the true and consecrated vocation of this widow whose hands moved at that impulse of God’s love, and who really trusted the words of the psalmist:

Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! *

whose hope is in the Lord their God;

Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; *

who keeps his promise for ever;

Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, *

and food to those who hunger.

Jesus wants his disciples and us to recognize the true and prophetic power of this woman, who with two coins that together had the value of less than a penny, demonstrated her subversive resistance to dehumanization and a holy denunciation of injustice and corruption. 

Perhaps the lesson from today’s Gospel story is for us to call out (as Jesus did) any form of religious practice or belief that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction. Any practice of faith that encourages our apathy in the face of economic, racial, gender, and political injustice. But perhaps most importantly, what we can learn from the widow is that riches come, not from acquiring, but from a letting go that takes us to the border between life and death where there are no guarantees, only hope; no security, only love, and a total surrender to God, who alone suffices.

I will end with a few lines from one of my favorite poems by Santa Teresa de Ávila:

Nada te turbe,

Nada te espante,

Todo se pasa,

Dios no se muda,

La paciencia

Todo lo alcanza;

Quien a Dios tiene

Nada le falta:

Sólo Dios basta.

(Let nothing disturb you, Let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never changes.

Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.)

¡Que así sea, en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! 

Amen+

Twentythird Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 27 A - November 8, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Proper 27 A  - Sunday, November 8, 2020

Amos 5:18-24
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

T.S. Eliot in “East Coker” of the Four Quartets writes, “In my beginning is my end.”  If there is anything this morning’s scripture teaches us is that it is not a time to be smug.  As Amos tells us, “Why do you want the day of the Lord?  It is darkness, not light.”  W.B. Yeats comments in his poem The Second Coming:

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep 

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Why would we want the day of the Lord, indeed?!?! 

  

Certainly, the threat of Amos, Paul’s strange language and five virgins being barred from entering the wedding banquet are reasons for uneasiness.  However, these passages raise other questions for me.  

Who is Amos really speaking to and why?  And what is Paul really speaking about?  What about the 10 virgins?  Who are they?  Who are the wise virgins and who are the foolish ones?  They are all bridesmaids, friends of the bride after all.

Perhaps the questions I am asking are beside the point.  But something tells me that dismissing them too easily might mean missing an opportunity to meet the bridegroom when he comes.  

Amos speaks to a people who are in great expectation for the Lord.  And yet, he refutes any and every claim that the coming will be pretty.  Those who escape a lion are only then to be surprised by a bear.  God takes no interest or even pleasure in their “solemn assemblies”.  The Lord will not accept anything they have to offer.  What the Israelites think is going to get them right with God ends up being exactly what God despises.  Who are God’s people now?

Paul writes to the Thessalonians “ … we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will be caught up in the clouds together with those who have died to meet the Lord in the air …”  Quite frankly, on the day after the funeral of my father, I have absolutely no idea what this means.  It confounds me, even frustrates me.  

The foolish virgins (or in another translation, the silly virgins) compound mistake after mistake.  In their desperation, they say, “Give us some oil.”  It was a demand, not a request and they were demanding the wrong thing. They could have figured out that the light of the wise virgins or even more so the bridegroom was enough to bring them to the banquet.  Instead they went on some wild goose chase in the dark and were left outside the door.  Even more so the wise ones could have shared their light if not their oil.  It seems strange that no one thought of this.  

Sure the foolish made their decisions and showed bad judgment, but perhaps the actions of the wise virgins or refusal to act begs the judgment that Amos brings down upon the Israelites.  

The bridegroom is delayed.  Paul thought he would come during his lifetime, during the lifetime of the Thessalonian church.  He was wrong.  10 virgins expected him earlier and only 5 were prepared when he finally does come.  And Amos … well, Amos describes his coming as not something to celebrate.  

Maybe the key resides in the coming being unexpected, surprising, leaving unanswered questions, even throwing us off balance.  And so we are kept on our toes, unsettled, uncomfortable, but awake.  We are brought through Christ’s death and resurrection in Baptism itself to be people of God, and as people of God, we can no longer be people who are complacent or asleep.  We are to be unsettled people, restless people, people who keep watch with love, people who long for justice and righteousness, people who are truly alive.  And thus maybe even be people who unsettle others and ourselves as well.

In his book, The Sacred Voice is Calling, John Neafsey, a clinical psychologist and theology lecturer, who has focused much of his work on vocation and social conscience surmises, “… An uneasy conscience may be one of the best places to listen for the whisper of the Spirit that calls us to a better way.”    

Just when we think we know when the bridegroom is coming or even what he will look like, he shows us something entirely other.  This gives us the capacity to show mercy and compassion.  Righteousness is not about piety, but it is about empathy and solidarity with those who may feel they have no access to the bridegroom.  When we are living in the truth of love, then, our worship truly expresses the mystery and disruption of God’s loving grace.  This is not something that the world around us always wants to see.  So many in the world would rather snuff that light out.      

Let’s face it.  We have been in the dark and have barred our own selves from the banquet.  We are in need of guidance.  But the call in the middle of the night may not be just to meet the bridegroom, but to guide others to meet him as well.  Then, the community is whole.  Then, 10 virgins get into the banquet.  Perhaps for this we are to be prepared.

The true hope of all this apocalyptic literature is that no matter where we are or think we are, in our inadequacy, in our bad decisions and the consequences that come of those, even if we think we are in the dark and are not recognised, the bridegroom comes at any time, even at midnight, to meet us.  Justice rolls and righteousness flows like mighty waters. And we are transformed, transformed as though we were caught up into a strong current right up into the air as Paul tells us.  Christ draws us into this conversion.  The banquet is still open to us and the guiding lamp in the middle of the night as well as our own lamps can bring all of us there.  

Pentecost 22C - Sunday, November 10, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Pentecost 22C - Proper 27 - Sunday, November 10, 2019

Job 19:23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

“Don’t confuse me with the facts.  My mind is made up.”

The source of the saying is unclear.  We can imagine who might say it.  It is a long list…  Our cultural moment is awash in minds made up.  It is a good, old-fashioned American value to have made up one’s mind.  Nice if the facts agree with the thing about which one’s mind is made up, but not always required!  Why let facts ruin a good story?  Made-up minds are strong, resolute, determined, immovable.  The culture idolizes people who know – or at least act like they know.  Sometimes we even elect them to office.  Having arrived at a made-up mind is a state not without a certain appeal.  What is the alternative?  Who wants to be defined as wishy-washy, lacking backbone, following the crowd, going with the flow?  That all sounds rather limp.  Molly Ivins, the late columnist and author from Texas expressed this idea in the images of my home state: “There is nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead squirrels.”  Civilized conversations across differences are rare.  Compromise is a dirty word.  It is easier to demonize and despise than to dialogue.  We may seem particularly polarized, locked in our minds that know and safely sequestered in our appropriate tribes, but we are not the first people to be so dangerously drawn into dualism.  This is as old a game as the Garden of Eden and we encounter a classic example in the Gospel for today.

Luke is the gospel of universality, portraying a Jesus who eagerly seeks out the rejected, outcast, unclean, and unwell and brings healing, forgiveness, community, and hope.  In teaching and miracle and parable Jesus declares the divine “yes” to each person without exception.  But Luke is no utopian fantasy story where everyone takes Jesus up on his offer.  The human “no” is always possible.  Frighteningly real and easy.  If heaven is likened to a banquet thrown in honor of one and all, a celebration of endless abundance and outrageous joy, then hell is the decision to stand outside the party, alone, in the darkness, and refuse to go in, refuse to break bread with tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers.  Those outside believe it is better to keep their hearts safe in its casket of judgment rather than to dignify such a blasphemous gathering of human scum.  My mind is made up.

The Sadducees in the gospel reading were skilled in the mind-making business, especially in how much better they were than, well, just about everybody.  They were a priestly sect that only accepted the Torah, the first five books, as authoritative.  We enter the scene in the early days of Holy Week.  Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem, and attracting large and enthusiastic crowds, much to the consternation of the Sadducees who come to pose this convoluted scenario to Jesus.  The Sadducees found no reference to the resurrection or life after death in the Torah, so they rejected it, though later writings begin to form an idea of resurrection, the Sadducees held onto to a hard-core purist position.  The question to Jesus is, like the question about paying taxes to Caesar, a no-win trap to which there is no straight answer that will not add to the already deep divisions about these issues.  “Do you read the text correctly, Jesus, or are you an enemy?”, they sneer.  So, with the crowds listening for his answer, the Sadducees know that if they can publicly shame him, catch him without an answer, or at least without a good one, the crowds will see him as a disgraced charlatan and move on, order restored, problem solved.

Jesus knows what is going on, of course.  His response turns the tables on them and uses their own sacred texts, his example of Moses at the burning bush is from Exodus 6, to make a point about life after death.  God, he says, did not cease to be God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob after they died.  “I am their God”, Yahweh proclaims to Moses, present tense.  If the patriarchs are alive, then everyone is alive in God.  Welcome to Bible study with Jesus, who probably has some good things to say about what the text means.  His way of using the text is as important as the content.  He is giving us an example of sacred reading.

Once when leading a retreat for a parish group here over a weekend, I allowed some time for questions during one of the sessions and someone asked, “Do you ever get bored reading the same psalms over and over again?”  Without thinking, I said, “we don’t read the same psalms.”  The answer is about a basic set of attitudes and assumptions about reading sacred scripture.  The Bible is not a static history book from which I extract a finite amount of data.  It is alive, breathed into.  The inspiration happens in the interplay, the event, the dance between text and reader out of which something new is eternally possible.  I don’t read the same psalms or any scripture the same way twice because I am not the same – my needs and questions are ever changing.

What is clear from Jesus’ use of the story of Moses at the burning bush is that Jesus had read the text.  He had listened to it, pondered it, noticed things about it.  He had connected stories together.  That God uses the present tense, “I am” the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob means something.  And because of that reading, Jesus can upturn a trap question about marriage customs designed to embarrass him by referencing a story that speaks of the very identity of God.  The question, Jesus is saying, is not “how do I get my doctrinal details and ethical conformity to every law so close to the text that I become the super-righteous person I am expected to be”.  The deeper and more important questions are; “who is God, how does God come to us and invite us into relationship and promise to be faithfully present to us even into eternity?”

The Sadducees did not read like this.  They found in the text what they wanted in order to perpetuate a system of temple control and power that benefited them.  Their agenda created a bias that turned the text into a weapon with which they could attack their enemies.  The Torah contains many commands to the people to show respect to the foreigner, generosity to widows and orphans, welcome to the stranger, and compassion to all – a revolutionary ethic that said treat others as God has treated you.  The Sadducees, if they had read carefully, should have seen in Jesus an embodiment of all that the Torah says about neighborliness, a call back to the heart of God’s covenant with a people for the whole world, and then welcomed Jesus with joyful gratitude as Messiah.  Instead, the Sadducees’ reading of the Torah, in seeking to discredit and defame Jesus - who only ever did good and obeyed God - conveniently skipped over those passages.  Their stubborn refusal to let go of their power and status in exchange for the wonder of God’s truth will keep them outside the party. 

If we read the Bible solely to justify our positions so that we can insult and demean the other in error, or even just different from us, it is not the Bible we are reading.  Have you ever thought, “Don’t confuse me with what the Bible says, my mind is made up”?  As a professor of mine liked to say, “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out”, but be open-minded and open-hearted enough to be bothered.  If you sincerely read the whole thing, especially the parts you do not like, you will be bothered.  The Bible inspires us with truth, encourages us, moves us with its beauty, but don’t stop there, keep going.  It talks about justice, money, possessions, generosity, service, love.   It bothers us.  Read it again.  Or, actually, read it as if for the first time.  This reading is not about fully grasping those mysteries, but remembering the first rule of theology: God is God, you are not.  Sacred reading is the decision to enter more consciously into the presence of God in reverence, ready to be instructed, consoled, or corrected, as God’s voice speaks in the text.

The correction part is the hardest and most uncomfortable.  Notice that Jesus told the Sadducees they were wrong, “and the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed in the story about the bush…”  He rejects their misreading and corrects it.  He resists nonviolently and non-judgmentally, however, with a view toward opening their minds and hearts to perceive the truth.  Reading in this way will give the text access to us, to mirror back to us what it has to say about our minds, our privilege, our attitudes, and invites us to honesty.  God then unmakes the mind that we so quickly make, and makes it into the mind of Christ.  We are headed toward the last day.  We can’t go into the party with a God of our own making.  We can only enter the banquet feast as guests of the God who is.  Jesus here is showing us how to be liberated from our stubbornness and inviting us into a life of grace that is wide enough to allow God to do in us and others what we cannot do alone.

Many times, Jesus could have entered the power game, taken a side, and demonized those labelled less holy and worthy than him – which would have been everybody.  That is what fanatics do, and Jesus is not a fanatic.  Jesus is a radical.  Fanatics define themselves by us versus them.  Radicals believe that in the depths of our being we long most for communion and community even more than competition and rivalry.  Radicals believe something better is possible in our relationships, that the great shared feast is real, and it is coming.  Where fanatics want to trap, radicals want to liberate.  Listen to your thoughts and words – radicals use words like “children of God”, “all”, and “alive” and turn the world upside down.

O God, bother us.  Expand our made-up minds, enlarge our constricted hearts.  Remind us that our holy reading reveals how much more there is to know of your infinitely mysterious yet revealed and present grace.  No, Molly, there is more in the middle of the road than just a yellow line and dead squirrels.  The middle place is the holy place, the meeting place, the middle of the road is where the bridge across the divide that tears us apart is waiting to be built, where possibilities are born, where one hand extended in friendship toward another is the beginning of a peace that will last and a justice that will never fail.  After the arguments, the positions, the schisms, the elections – after all the walls are down and all the labels peeled off and there is no more “us versus them” but only one great holy “we”, after the conquests of nations are swallowed up by the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, what lasts forever is life, real resurrection life, a party.  Come on inside.

Proper 27, Year A: November 12, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis   OHC
Proper 27 - Sunday, November 12, 2017


To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

 Br. John Forbis, OHC

We are in a stage of the Liturgical Year where we begin to look at the end before we begin again. If there is anything this morning’s scripture teaches us is that it is not a time to be smug. As Amos tells us, “Why do you want the day of the Lord?  It is darkness, not light.”  As W.B. Yeats comments in his poem The Second Coming:

The darkness drops again, but now I know. That twenty centuries of stony sleep. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Why would we want the day of the Lord, indeed?!?! 

 

Certainly, the threat of Amos, Paul’s strange language and five virgins being barred from entering the wedding banquet are obvious reasons for uneasiness. However, these passages raise other questions for me.

Who is Amos really speaking to and why?  And what is Paul really speaking about?  What about the 10 virgins?  Who are they?  Who are the wise virgins and who are the foolish ones?  They are all bridesmaids, friends of the bride after all.

Perhaps the questions I am asking are beside the point. But something tells me that dismissing them too easily might mean missing an opportunity to meet the bridegroom when he comes.

Amos speaks to a people who are in great expectation for the Lord. And yet, he refutes any and every claim that the coming will be pretty. Those who escape a lion are only then to be surprised by a bear. God takes no interest or even pleasure in their “solemn assemblies”. The Lord will not accept anything they have to offer. What the Israelites think is going to get them right with God ends up being exactly what God despises. Who are God’s people now?

Paul writes to the Thessalonians “ … we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord will be caught up in the clouds together with those who have died to meet the Lord in the air …”  What?

The foolish virgins (or in another translation, the silly virgins) compound mistake after mistake. In their desperation, they say, “Give us some oil.”  It was a demand, not a request and they were demanding the wrong thing. They could have figured out that the light of the wise virgins or even more so the bridegroom was enough to bring them to the banquet. Instead, they went on some wild goose chase in the dark and were left outside the door. Even more so the wise ones could have shared their light if not their oil. It seems strange that no one thought of this.

Sure the foolish made their decisions and showed bad judgment, but perhaps the actions of the wise virgins or refusal to act begs the judgment that Amos brings down upon the Israelites. The bridegroom is delayed. Paul thought he would come during his lifetime, during the lifetime of the Thessalonian church. He was wrong. 10 virgins expected him earlier and only 5 were prepared when he finally does come. And Amos … well, Amos describes his coming as not something to celebrate too readily.

Maybe the key resides in the coming being unexpected, surprising, leaving unanswered questions, even throwing us off balance. And so we are kept on our toes, unsettled, uncomfortable, but awake. We are brought through Christ’s death and resurrection in Baptism itself to be people of God, and as people of God, we can no longer be people who are complacent or asleep. We are to be unsettled people, restless people, people who keep watch with love, people who long for justice and righteousness, people who are truly alive. And thus maybe even be people who unsettle as well.

In his book, The Sacred Voice is Calling, John Neafsey, a clinical psychologist and theology lecturer, who has focused much of his work on vocation and social conscience surmises, "… An uneasy conscience may be one of the best places to listen to the whisper of the Spirit that calls us to a better way."

Just when we think we know when the bridegroom is coming or even what he will look like, he shows us something entirely other. This gives us the capacity to show mercy and compassion. Righteousness is not about piety, but it is about empathy and solidarity with those who may feel they have no access to the bridegroom. When we are living in the truth of love, then, our worship truly expresses the mystery and disruption of God’s loving grace. This is not something that the world around us always wants to see. So many in the world would rather snuff that light out.

Let’s face it. We have been in the dark and have barred our own selves from the banquet. We are in need of guidance. But the call in the middle of the night may not be just to meet the bridegroom but to guide others to meet him as well. Then, the community is whole. Then, 10 virgins get into the banquet. Perhaps for this, we are to be prepared.

The true hope of all this apocalyptic literature is that no matter where we are or think we are, in our inadequacy, in our bad decisions and the consequences that come of those, even if we think we are in the dark and are not recognised, the bridegroom comes at any time, even at midnight, to meet us. Justice rolls and righteousness flow like mighty waters. And we are transformed, transformed as though we were caught up in a strong current right up into the air as Paul tells us. Christ draws us into this conversion. The banquet is still open to us and the guiding lamp in the middle of the night, as well as our own, can bring all of us there.